ADDRESSES AT GENERAL SESSIONS THE PRESIDENT'S ANNUAL ADDRESS PRESIDENT CHARLES CUTHBERT HALL, D. D. The Dean of Yale Divinity School, my honored predecessor in the Presidency of the Religious Education Association, said, in the address with which he opened the Second Convention, "The opportunity before the Religious Education Association is boundless. The year to come is the critical year of the organization." The year of which Dean Sanders prophesied is ended. We have passed the crisis - and we live. There are crises which men pass unconsciously, swept over them on the high tide of destiny, knowing but in retrospect or in theory the peril of the way. There are also moments and years of critical testing through which men go, open-eyed, measuring well the risks they take, feeling every ounce of the burdens they bear, yet enduring as seeing Him who is invisible. If the year just ended has been, as the former President predicted, the critical year of the organization, those to whom was intrusted the management of its affairs were not unconscious of risks and burdens. There were places in the year where to move forward was an act of faith in the value of a principle. Many hopes were centered in the General Secretary, both in the office and in the man. The office of General Secretary is the natural medium of communication between the Association and the country. Of the incumbent of that office it was hoped that, joining excellence of character with devotion to an ideal, he would become the incarnate expression of the principle for which the Association stands. But it was otherwise ordered. Reasons of conscience caused him to reconsider his purpose to make this his life work, and in November the first General Secretary resigned, to enter another field of labor. We are grateful for what he did in his brief term of service; we are sure of his loyalty to the cause of Religious Education; we bid him Godspeed. For months the office of General Secretary stood vacant. It is now filled by one who enters it attended by many hopes and desires that, having clear vision of the goal, with courage and strength for the way, he may live to see the glorious result of a movement that has been begun in prayer, chastened by misunderstanding, sustained by self-sacrifice, animated by love. The circumstances just related nullified for the past year the field-work which had been planned. The General Secretary for a work like this must be an apostle in labor, a statesman in vision. His field is the country; his parish the mind of the American people. He must penetrate into states; discover and co-ordinate the purposes of like-minded citizens; arouse the local press; turn the hearts of the fathers to the children. He must make friends in every city for the cause we have at heart. He must preach the gospel of religious education until that preaching is realized by the high-minded and the patriotic as a career opening before men of culture and feeling, who would protect the country from perils born of its own prosperity, and rescue from the overlay of a ponderous materialism the spiritual ideals of the founders of the Republic. Of this we have been deprived during our year of crisis. From our appeal to the country the chief voice has been lacking, as it shall not be lacking, please God, in the year to come. No wonder, then, that our results, in some things, are less than we hoped. The past year has not witnessed the solution of our financial problem. The solving of that problem could not be expected to occur in advance of settled conditions in the office of General Secretary, and this for obvious reasons. Large popular membership is our natural source of income. The Religious Education Association is an affair of the people. Behind it are no wealthy promoters. It has access to no secret channel of supply. It sprang from the patriotic convictions of educators, and educators are not blessed with great riches. They are men of the people, and on the people they must depend. But, in the absence of a General Secretary, it has been impossible to approach the people, and to secure the adequate co-operation of that powerful and generous interpreter of popular movements, the newspaper press. The people have not known, and to-day they do not know, the moral excellence, and the practical reasonableness, of our principle. Had they known, their patriotism and good citizenship could absolutely have been depended upon to provide, through popular memberships, our modest income. When the people understand, they will respond, not grudgingly nor of necessity, but with the cheerfulness that God loves. It might well be that such conditions of disadvantage and delay would shake an enterprise standing upon weak and shallow foundations, or would dissipate energy enlisted on the side of unreality. In the hot fires of our modern life, the wood, the hay, the stubble of irrational dreams soon perish. Nor were the men by whom this movement was conceived of a temper to tolerate the burdens that it has entailed, were those burdens not esteemed to be imposed by God. Their lives were full of other cares, and committed to other interests. From this movement they had nothing to gain for themselves but further weariness and the probability of being misjudged by some. Yet disadvantage and delay brought them no sense of insecure purpose, no suggestion of doubt. The year of testing disclosed the impregnable foundations of the idea itself, and the moral commitment of its apologists. It knit them together in oneness of purpose, in the sweet communion of a true and good intention. They reflected that, in the hardships of its earlier years, the Religious Education Association follows the experience of other movements now advanced to prosperity and intrenched in the public confidence. When, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, men like Wilberforce and Charles Grant were advocating the duty of English Christians to establish missions in the Orient, that the leading ideas of the faith of Jesus Christ might be planted as an incorruptible seed in the religious consciousness of the East, their proposals were ignored by some, resented by others, laughed to scorn by many. When the National Education Association arose in this country, its founders endured with patience a baptismal period of popular indifference and financial dearth. It may be doubted whether any of the greater causes by which content and balance have been added to civilized life have reached the stage of efficiency unchastened by the discipline of delay. Furthermore, it is to be remembered that delay is a relative term, formidable in one set of relations, inconsiderable in another. The delay of a moment in acute illness may mean death. The delay of a year in the life of a man may mean heartbreak, irreparable loss. But moments and years count for little, relatively, in the lives of great institutions, in the evolution of great ideas. Men are impatient; God is patient. Men who are filled with an idea want to see its full fruition, its universal adoption, in their lifetime; God "buries His workers, and carries on His work." Unmoved, therefore, by secondary disadvantages and delays, probable, if not wisely desirable, in the incipient stage of an important undertaking, the officers and departmental workers of the Religious Education Association have come up to this Convention in joy and hope born of results so profound in themselves, and so prophetic, that our superficial delays and drawbacks are for the moment forgotten. During the year we have witnessed two results: The growth of the influence of our idea upon the public mind, and our own advance toward the better definition of it. These results have appeared simultaneously; yet, in the order of thought, the first has antedated, and must have antedated, the second. The idea must lay hold of men before the definition of it is possible. By this token we believe in the greatness, the divineness, of our undertaking. The details of small and transitory movements may be grasped at the outset. Those to whom God gives the vision of great movements must have time to think themselves clear. Initial exactness of definition belongs to the small utilities of life. Vague sublimity is the first stage in the manifestation of great conceptions of living. Men feel that ideas are true. before they can define wherein that truth resides. The fundamental idea of the Religious Education Association has increased in influence upon the public mind during the last twelvemonth. Upon those who have stood nearest to the idea, and have been working toward its clearer definition, the increase of its influence over themselves has been very striking. Not infrequently it happens that men think they see land, to find, on drawing nearer, that it was mirage flickering on an empty ocean. But they who thought they saw the uprising of substantial duty in a call to bring religion into right relation with every form and channel of popular education know to-day that this was not ethical mirage, but plain reality. They see that the intellectual development of this country is advancing rapidly and upon an enormous scale. They see that the mind of the American people lends itself to education as the outcome of liberty. They see that all educational avenues, from those leading to the state and private universities to those leading to the public schools, are thronged with armies of the finest and most promising youth that the world has ever seen; youth unfettered by political and military despotism; unweighted with the pessimism of Oriental traditions; intuitively conscious of its own rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; keen and quick to learn. They see that libraries, magazines, newspapers are as bread to the body, the natural food of these happy, hopeful generations. They see that illiteracy, superstition, cruelty, abominable habits of ignorance, anarchy, the devils that possess backward and unlettered races, are exorcised from national life by the amazing potency of education, and that our sons and daughters are growing up in intellectual sanity, prepared to build a broader civilization than the founders dreamed of, and to count for a positive force in the life of the world. This educational development manifestly is of God. We are reap ing from the good seed that the fathers sowed; and the fathers were men of God. They believed in the value and in the liberty of the individual. They believed in the right of a man to become what God intended him to be. They believed that government exists for the good of all, and that the conception of a democratic state is in accord with the genius of humanity and the intention of the Almighty Mind. But God-given liberty and God-given education carry with them no guaranties of public welfare, save those vested in God. The gift without the Giver might be more than barren; even power without responsibility, freedom without principle, knowledge without reverence. The liberalizing influence of education cannot be depended upon, apart from religion, to protect a populous nation from debasement of ideals and from aberration of ethical judgment. Knowledge, absolved from the fear of God, may, by sharpening the senses, promote selfishness, not less brutal because outwardly refined. Great prosperity may become barbaric materialism in a land where men teach their youths everything except to worship God. The defense of a nation from such a doom is furnished by no external authority, civil or ecclesiastical. It emerges out of the enlightened conscience of the people, which, as if intuitively, bears witness that the time has come when public morality and public interest demand stronger accent on the religious aspects of education. For this does our Association exist. This is its fundamental idea; the vision that for three years has attended us, continually growing more distinct, continually extending its sphere of influence over other minds. The sublimity of an idea, while it may work for inspiration, lacks practical effectiveness so long as it lacks definition. Men may be convinced that religion in education is vital, and that the cultivation of the religious sense in youth is indispensable; but to translate that conviction into wise and fruitful methods of action demands the broad study of conditions. The situation takes on apparent simplicity in lands where Church and State are united, and the propagation of religion is guaranteed under a royal establishment. In a land like ours, where religious liberty, tolerance, and individualism are universal, where the establishment principle is unknown, where every man may worship God or refrain from worshiping Him, according to the dictates of his conscience, the problem of Religious Education takes on majestic reality. It challenges the attention of all lovers of the country and lovers of the world. It invites the co-operation not only of all who stand on the side of religion as against secularism, but also of those high-minded secularists who, dissenting from the form of religion, yet show themselves not uninfluenced by its spirit. Step by |